Barack Obama and the Jim Crow Media

by Ishmael Reed

  As an example of hypocritical posturing of media, white males who scold black men, like the divorcees and adulterers who praised Obama’s lecturing black fathers, David Letterman poked fun at Tiger Woods’ problems in his Top Ten Text Messages sent by Tiger. David Letterman still has his sponsors, without any protest from the white feminists at Huffington Post and Salon.com, progressive sites that are outdoing The National Enquirer in their obsession with Tiger Woods. Among Letterman’s sponsors are Old Navy, Lipitor, H&R Block, Verizon, Direct TV and leading automobile and film companies.

  The Kurtz panel decided that Letterman’s exploitation of the women working for him was different from Tiger’s relationship with women who were not employees of his, because Letterman confessed to his sexual transgression immediately, when some might argue that his extortionist forced him to do so.

  When blacks complain that they are treated differently from whites, they might find confirmation during the last week in December. Charlie Sheen, a movie star whose face is recognized by millions the world over, was arrested for threatening his wife with a knife, an occurrence that wasn’t mentioned during The Reliable Sources program that was aired on December 27, nor was there any discussion about his possibly losing his advertising contract with an underwear manufacturer. They dropped him, but CBS doesn’t seem in a hurry to drop Two and a Half Men, starring Charlie Sheen, which, at the end of 2009, drew eleven million viewers.

  In her autobiography, A Paper Life, Tatum O’Neal claims she was abused by her tennis-ace husband John McEnroe. She said that “the hot-headed sportsman regularly beat her up after his tantrums on the tennis court and claims he was a heavy cannabis smoker,” yet National Car Rental doesn’t seem eager to drop him as a spokesperson. If Tiger had threatened his wife with a knife as Charlie Sheen had done or beaten her as McEnroe beat Tatum O’Neal would he still have his advertisers? Or if he had confessed his dalliances with other women when threatened by an extortionist?

  When The Wall Street Journal asked me to comment about Tiger’s situation I said that he should seek advice from Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger.

  Women who were employed by Hollywood chose to remain anonymous when complaining about sexual advances against them by movie star Arnold Schwarzenegger. Though sportscaster Stephen Smith said that through his “antics” Tiger had alienated women, none of the complaints from women who had been sexually harassed by Schwarzenegger (Tiger’s affairs were consensual), reported in a story from The Los Angeles Times, seemed to cause his alienation from women. On October 31, 2006, Uprisingradio.com reported:

  During Arnold Schwarzenegger’s campaign for governor in the 2003 recall election, a number of women came forward to reveal their sexual harassment and assault by Arnold. The Los Angeles Times printed extensive reports just prior to that election. Now, just three years later, there is almost no mention of Arnold’s sexist escapades. But some women are refusing to remain silent. More than a hundred women from across California have signed a letter to remind voters of the seriousness of the accusations of sixteen women against Schwarzenegger that surfaced during the 2003 recall campaign, and those that have surfaced since then involving minors.

  Nevertheless, in 2003, he carried the women’s vote and, after his election, family-values spokesperson Senator Orrin Hatch proposed that the laws be changed so that he could run for president.

  Racists are identified as those who are unable to distinguish between members of one race from another. That certainly appeared to be the case of the media and the country’s spreading Negro mania, mania being the word used by The Philadelphia Inquirer, which observed that Tiger mania was the biggest story to inspire mania since O.J. Simpson. One wonders which black male celebrity caught in a scandal will define the end of this decade.

  David Carr is hipper than most white journalists. He was probably amused when he read a clueless column written by his colleague Frank Rich in which Imus-defender Rich said that the media’s reaction to Tiger’s problems had nothing to do with race. Tell that to Vanity Fair magazine, which ran a half-naked photo of Tiger Woods taken by Annie Leibovitz, who drew criticism for a previous photo of LeBron James that was based upon a World War I propaganda poster of a gorilla carrying off a white woman. Joan Walsh wrote on Salon.com:

  Vanity Fair should be ashamed of itself. The Thug Life photo of Tiger Woods that graces the magazine’s February cover will go down in history with Time’s “darkened” O.J. Simpson cover and Vogue’s portrait of a brutish LeBron James carrying off a blond princess two years ago. I’ve always defended Woods’ freedom to call himself Cablinasian, as befitting his mixed heritage. But Vanity Fair just proved the arguments of black people who dislike what they see as Woods’ racial dodge. He’ll always be black, but especially after he gets in trouble.

  A black man exposed as a lover of Nordic-type white women has nothing to do with race? Rich hasn’t read the sick disgusting blogs about Tiger’s affairs written by white people who didn’t go to Harvard.

  David Carr on the other hand has been around and knows the streets. He knows for example that the media’s description that crack is a black drug is false because he has smoked crack with white people (See: The Night of the Gun: A Reporter Investigates The Darkest Story of His Life). He was among the first to identify the media stories about widespread looting, rape and mayhem among black Katrina victims as being based upon exaggerations and lies. While complaints by blacks, Hispanics and Native Americans about media coverage for over one hundred years have been ignored or patronized, Carr at least acknowledges that the mainstream media have been accused of “pathologizing” black men, yet his explanation was in my mind unsatisfactory. (He also ignored the growing anger among blacks about the film Precious, which he admires). He wrote:

  Mainstream media have been accused of pathologizing the African-American male, but—let’s face it—three men who happened to be black moved a lot of units this year. Just try to imagine this past year in media without President Obama, Michael Jackson and Tiger Woods. And lest you think it was all pathology and politics, it is worth noting that on Twitter, the elections in Iran outranked Michael Jackson, who came in second, according to What the Trend, a site that ranked topics in 2009 (whatthetrend.com/zeitgeist). In an age that is ridiculed as chronically unserious, a life-and-death struggle for freedom on the other side of the world is the story that rang the bell on Twitter.

  What kind of pathological behavior did President Obama engage in? Maybe the media’s linking Obama to athletes involved in scandal might be pathological. And since when has Twitter become mainstream media? Mainstream media is The New York Post which had more cover stories (twenty) about Tiger than about 9/11.

  Like the old puritan elders who condemned women who were manipulated by Hawthorne’s black man in the forest, Frank Rich signed up for the Tiger mania when he coupled Tiger Woods with the Enron scandal and like the Huffington Post, which printed a piece linking Tiger’s failure with that of Barack Obama’s that was so outrageous that it was pulled. Rich, under the category of “they all look alike” wrote:

  Woods will surely be back on the links once the next celebrity scandal drowns his out. But after a decade in which two true national catastrophes, a wasteful war and a near-ruinous financial collapse, were both in part byproducts of the ease with which our leaders bamboozled us, we can’t so easily move on. This can be seen in the increasingly urgent political plight of Barack Obama. Though the American left and right don’t agree on much, they are both now coalescing around the suspicion that Obama’s brilliant presidential campaign was as hollow as Tiger’s public image—a marketing scam designed to camouflage either his covert anti-American radicalism (as the right sees it) or spineless timidity (as the left sees it).

  Let’s see. As a result of the Enron scandals, pensioners lost billions of dollars, twenty thousand people lost their jobs and some of those tied to Enron committed suicide. Isn’t Rich’s linking of Tiger Woods and Enron as strange as that of a white writer at the end
of the 1990s nominating O.J. as the individual who defined that decade. But his noticing a right and left agreement was right on target.

  While for Rich, Tiger is the most scandalous figure of the decade and indeed defines the decade, for Americans, when asked by a Wall Street Journal/NBC poll “What public figure disappointed you most in 2009?” John Edwards came in at thirty-three percent. Tiger Woods came in at a distant sixteen percent. While Jan Crawford, chief legal correspondent for CBS, dubbed Caucasian Broadcasting for its lack of inclusion, said on January 3, Face The Nation, that Americans were beginning to question Obama’s competency, according to a USA Today/Gallup Poll, Barack Obama, among American men, was the most admired.

  On January 3 on CNN, Peggy Noonan, who claimed to speak for “the American people,” criticized Obama’s domestic programs while being allowed to dominate a panel that included black Princeton historian Nell Painter, and when Ms. Painter attempted to challenge Ms. Noonan’s Republican talking points about higher taxes, blah, blah, with useful information, she was interrupted by Ms. Noonan whom Fareed Zakaria called a historian. Historian? Ms. Noonan is famous because she coined the phrase “A thousand points of light,” which meant that individuals and charitable institutions should be charged with relieving the country’s poor instead of the government, ignoring the fact that many of the main charities depended upon government support. On the Sunday that Ms. Noonan appeared, The New York Times reported that thanks to President Clinton’s Welfare Reform Act, for six million people, food stamps were the only source of income.

  Ms. Noonan, Tina Brown and Maureen Dowd represent the creeping Antoinettism that is affecting the upper-middle-class sisterhood, but at least Ms. Noonan, who believes that health care is a frivolous issue, even though millions of her white sisters are suffering because of a lack of health care, does not believe that her situation is worse than that of the black, brown, yellow and white male poor, which is what was implied when Gloria Steinem said that “gender” is the most “restrictive force” in American life. According to Peter Manso, in a forthcoming revised biography of Norman Mailer, Ms. Steinem’s projects are backed by a Provincetown lesbian who is worth from two hundred to three hundred million dollars. Gender doesn’t seem to be “restricting” Ms. Steinem.

  The year ended with progressives risking the traditional charge that blacks and Latinos are “invisible” to them. This is what Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man was all about. A former generation of “progressives” abandoning domestic issues, like home foreclosures and the poor, for crises that were taking place overseas. For today’s progressives, there is more interest in prison conditions in Gitmo than in Rikers Island, a few miles from where progressive Amy Goodman broadcasts Democracy Now. More concern about torture in secret prisons abroad than about torture in Chicago and Buffalo.

  While progressive commentators insist that Obama is losing his base and that millions of progressives are abandoning the president his poll numbers among non-whites at the end of the year was a whopping seventy-three percent approving, twenty percent disapproving according to the Pew Research Center for the People & the Press.

  On ESPN, a sports network, Barack Obama was linked to Michael Vick, another black male celebrity who was subjected to an endless Zapruder-like loop. To the dismay of sports writers, traditionally the most backward and racist contingent of the Jim Crow media, his teammates, the Philadelphia Eagles, applauded Vick’s courage by giving him an award and football fans gave him enthusiastic response upon his return to playing football.

  Clay Travis of Fanhouse decided that he didn’t need fellow white panelists to help him weigh in on the ten sports scandals of the decade. He decided that he would be the single judge of their actions. Seven out of ten scandals involved black athletes, including Kobe Bryant. The night before I read about the Travis verdict, I had watched a sizable segment of Sacramento Kings fans abandon their team to cheer Kobe’s making a crucial buzzer three-pointer to defeat their team.

  Travis is not the only one who is out of touch. The public that, when polled, found Obama to be the most admired of American men, disagreed with Frank Rich when he agreed with Rush Limbaugh that Tiger and Obama were “running neck and neck as the most unlikable frauds in the world.”

  About the pundits, both of the left and right, meaning white when they refer to Obama’s “base,” or “his friends” abandoning Obama, Jamison Foser of Media Matters, December 23, wrote under the headline: “Why does Howard Kurtz use white public opinion as the neutral baseline?”

  When you get past Howard Kurtz’s weird obsession with Tiger Woods, and his clumsy attempts to link Woods and President Obama, there’s another problem with his piece today about Obama’s race. (Take a look: www.washingtonpost.com)

  “I have no doubt that no matter how deep a hole Obama digs himself, African Americans, who are already the most loyal Democratic group, will remain his fiercest defenders…”

  In Kurtz’s formulation, the fact that white support for Obama is at only forty-two percent means that Obama has dug himself a hole. White support for Obama, in this construct, is the impartial baseline against which Kurtz assesses Obama’s “true” performance as president—he has dug himself a hole. And since African-American opinion of his performance doesn’t reflect that “true” assessment, African Americans will fiercely defend Obama no matter what. Kurtz’s formulation is simply a subtler version of Chris Matthews’ tendency to use the phrase “regular folks” when he means “white folks.”

  He was right. On the January 5 edition of Hard Ball, Matthews said that Obama was being “hit by the right as well as the left. Where are his supporters on the Democratic side?”

  Nobody from cable asked me to make a prediction for the next decade. Here it goes: Two thousand ten will see more cooperation between the white left and right. Frank Rich commented about this coalescing of interests when he left no degrees of separation between President Obama, Tiger Woods and Enron. This coalescing of the white right and left will continue. The white right will continue to try to break Obama. For its part, the white left from the time of the Abolitionist movement to today has never been comfortable with black leadership. Signs of cooperation between white right and left groups have become so visible that by the mid 2010s you might see a left-wing version of the tea party movement, with a Provincetown contingent waving banners along side one from South Carolina.

  Why not? The progressive movement is now dominated by the white LGBTers and the white middle-class feminist movement. White, because black gays and lesbians say that they’ve been excluded from the mainstream LBGT movement and black women have been complaining about racism in the feminist movement for over one hundred years.

  Proof that blacks and Latinos are excluded from the progressive movement comes in the form of a progressive like Ed Schultz warning President Obama that he is losing his “base,” and Frank Rich writing that the president has “bamboozled us.” On progressive Pacifica Berkeley’s KPFA, two white Buddhist males were talking about how their generation had access to luxuries denied even emperors and kings of former time.

  One of them said that “we” can walk into a supermarket and be exposed to a variety of goods. Which “base” and which “us” and which “we”? Moreover, did you ever think that you’d see Jane Hamsher from Firedog Lake signing petitions with Grover Norquist of Americans for Tax Reform, who says he wants to reduce government to so small a size that you can strangle it in a bathtub? Maybe it’s not so surprising. While Norquist is called “a radical rightist,” Ms. Hamsher might be called a radical leftist. Norquist, a right-winger so powerful that former President Bush sent representatives to his meetings, described President Obama as “John Kerry with a tan.” Not to be outdone Ms. Hamsher thought it clever to alter the facial color of Senator Joseph Lieberman. Her blackface Lieberman was so outrageous that Arianna Huffington, of The Huffington Post, pulled the photo. Maybe if The Huffington Post employed more blacks they’d get some advice that wouldn’t make it necessary for
them to always have to pull things. Writer John Dickerson was outraged, he wrote:

  It pains me to no end that this appeared on none other than The Huffington Post, because I honestly can’t believe Arianna Huffington would be a willing party to such racist trash. This may not make me any friends at the HuffPo but, seriously, someone at HuffPo needs to come out and address Hamsher’s actions immediately.

  But I guess that since “gender” is the “most restrictive force in American life,” progressives like Ms. Hamsher are allowed to go blackface from time to time. An even more shocking alliance between the right and the left was a writer from the Revolutionary Communist Party, comrade Annie Day, agreeing with Barbara Bush about the merits of the movie, Precious. A movie that is being used to suggest that incest is a widespread practice in the black community. A movie that supports Draconian welfare policies and the sterilization of black women. For my criticism of the movie, Ms. Annie Day called me—are you ready for this—“a misogynist,” yet Ms. Day serves a white patriarch who has built a cult of personality around himself. At least white cultural nationalist outfits like The Huffington Post and Salon.com appear to have women in charge. Also, is this Maoist suggesting that I should use Mao Tse Tung as an example of how men should treat women? And given her attitudes toward black men, revealed in her article criticizing my CounterPunch essay about the film, Precious, her co-writer, Carl Dix, a black man, will never ascend to the leadership of the Revolutionary Communist Party. The Revolutionary Communist Party and Barbara Bush. Bizarre bedfellows.